The Marbled Swarm (10 page)
Alfonse began to watch something, what, I’m not entirely certain. It seemed to fly in circles, and to not be of this earth, or so I gathered since he’d never looked that horrified by anything before.
Suddenly, whatever had compiled Alfonse’s skull and skin and cartilage into a face stopped working, but I thought he looked incredible. I thought if he had always looked that undemonstrative, he would have been famous, although I had no idea for what reason.
François seemed content to watch my brother blanch and crystallize into a less involving boy and nonspecific shape, but I felt strangely unprepared for that divide.
Once Alfonse and I had played a game of Truth or Dare, if you remember, in which I’d introduced his death throes as a form of entertainment. When given every option to expire, Alfonse had not picked being fucked to death or any other fate that was another word for blood loss. Instead, he’d opted to be steamrolled, and, when this memory returned to me, I argued that his wish be granted, although I guess I thought we’d use a car.
I was too adamant to follow François’s logic that, since “Alfonse” was now a body’s dying title, we could no more grant his wish than kissing Oscar Wilde’s grave marker while wearing lipstick can retract the author’s loneliness.
I recall our hobbling down a staircase more than how I talked us into being there. Azmir held my brother upside down, and I trotted alongside, and François twitched a cut-glass bowl half full of nougats underneath Alfonse’s head in hopes of catching blood before it scabbed his carpet.
After a treacherous right turn that left us standing in a pool of candies, and a traffic jam while François solved a dead bolt, we found ourselves in the garage, which seemed unaltered since my mother had scarcely used it as the place where guests could smoke when it was raining.
Azmir explained how gore behaved, such as its tendency to use young, flimsy stomachs as fire exits and redeploy the eyes, nostrils, and mouth as launching pads for its projectiles, whereupon it was agreed the body should be laid facedown upon the concrete floor.
In one corner of the room, there was a hefty wooden can that looked to have been fished from movie pirate waters. It was three-quarters full of very dark, wet dirt, having been filled by François’s gardener as he revamped a flower bed in the mansion’s small front yard the afternoon before.
The can was leaden, but, between the three of us, we yanked it airborne then rocked and scraped the bottom six or seven steps to where Alfonse reclined, using his last few brain cells to inflate and slump his upper back.
As the only light source was a glary ceiling lamp, the can gave off an oblong shadow that became an evil spotlight. When my brother’s feet were charcoaled, François counted down from five, and we let go.
While I would love to say we left an animation cell depicting dainty feet, I will say we left him socks engorged with children’s cheapest Christmas gifts, and even that peculiar image does Alfonse’s last impression quite a favor.
We moved the spotlight, smashing circle after circle flat as best we could. His knees and thighs took seven drops to look like baggy legs. The sculpture garden in his hips was chipped away and finally buckled, although not into the mush I’d hoped, and only after Azmir climbed atop the can and stomped the final centimeter.
Between our weariness and percolating sweat, which caused the can to roam within our hands—and I’ll admit my lifts were something of an act, and the can a portly Ouija board—it took eight drops before the upper torso was a mat.
The shoulders never lost their crossbar look, and even hacking it out of their initial barbell took forever.
My brother’s head had no resolve but went down
shooting—eyeballs, teeth, tongue, and very abstract objects coughed out of his cavities and nostrils, or would bash themselves new shortcuts where needed.
Every time we raised the can, his mouth was more outstretched, until it dwarfed his face as much as any alligator’s.
I couldn’t think, and even that insouciance was canceled out when every dead celebrity whose surreptitious morgue shot I had Googled massed against me from the far ends of my memory and snapped their fingers in my face.
I must have sobbed since even Azmir asked if I was still myself, albeit with the leeriness that stars of movies check on costars who’ve been chewed upon by zombies.
The garage had a second door so hidden by a stack of cardboard boxes in my family’s tenure that, until François turned its knob, I’d always thought it had been stored against the wall just like the cargo piled in front of it.
It led onto a brick footpath that gentrified a tight-knit residue of space between the mansion’s southern wall and neighbor’s fence, where François used a garden hose to wash the blood and splatter off our legs.
I was put in charge of fetching our respective outfits from the master bedroom, and, therewith, pardoned from the manly task awaiting François and Azmir—namely, shoveling the afterimage of my brother off the floor and into some container.
As I think I’ve mentioned, I no more spend time reading novels than you would kill your brothers. Hence, how authors give dead characters’ survivors room to grieve while, presumably within the same handful of paragraphs, checking off new plot twists as though nothing diabolical has happened is wizardry to me.
Still, I know enough to guess that, having not just killed Alfonse but sort of cried, I should be out of kilter, so I’ll try to wreck the next few pages of my story in some self-effacing fashion, and, thus, this decimation has begun, not that you or even I could swear to it.
Scaling the death row through which my brother had been hurried, and not so many months after it had formed a bumpy slide down which he would repeatedly kerplunk and laugh astride a giant piece of cardboard, proved a more disorienting hike than the incline had portended.
I’d reached the first-floor landing and laid my hand upon the banister, when I heard a throat clear to my left, whereupon a voice sourced from the same distinctive set of vocal chords asked, “What happened in there.”
Peering down the hallway, I saw an Asian boy with waist-length hair—a coiffure christened “Gloomy Girl” when it was fashionable, meaning two years prior for several months. It was purportedly inspired by the hairstyle of the daughter in Pixar’s
The Incredibles
, i.e., a dour teen whom I believe could turn invisible, if that helps you imagine him.
He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing the fattened, low-slung jeans that young suburbanites procure from fake designer clothing stores around Les Halles, then, as if mystically possessed by the street cred of their style’s hip-hop progenitors, they begin to speak in syncopated rhymes to their disapproving parents.
Let me add that, as in the cases of Azmir and Didier, this boy’s speaking patterns are too explosive for my idiom, and I will make him sound as though he sounds vaguely like me but with an edge.
As bleary as the post-Alfonse world looked to me, I guessed he was Olivier, François’s sort of son. Still, even accounting for the politesse I lazily associate with everyone Eurasian, his vibe seemed too blase given I was naked and had not yet lost the bulk of my erection.
“Exactly what I’m sure it sounded like,” I said evenly.
“Are you finished,” he asked, again without a trace of curiosity.
He was leaning gently to the right, one hand splayed and resting on a wall, but not as lightly as his tilt would warrant. The palm was tensed into a Gothic arch, the fingers flexing on their whitened tips. Meanwhile, his other hand, which I’d misread as settled in a pocket, was rumpling his flabby jeans and tending an erection that seemed no less out of place than mine.
“Granted, it doesn’t feel like we’re finished, but logic says we are,” I said.
“So, does this mean you’re going home,” he asked.
“Your father thinks my leaving is appropriate, and it’s not for me to disagree,” I said.
“Were you to stall for just a minute, I think you would be interested by what’s in there,” he said, eyeing the wall his hand was scrunching. “By that I don’t mean Didier, although you’ll likely find him interesting as well, or, as ‘interest’ might be pushing it, useful, since, as I’m confident my father told you, he’s a prodigy regarding other people’s penises, and you clearly seem to have one.
“All I ask as recompense is that you consider me the vague beginnings of a friend. Truth is, while a life of tragedies and sexual abuse has hollowed me into a disbeliever in the scuttlebutt concerning love, there is, in addition to your total foxiness, a lack of something or other about your personage that I find sympathetic.”
“You seem to know some of my passwords,” I said carefully. “Still, as I rank a change of scenery at the top of my priorities, and since I’ve spent a billion seconds of my life strolling idly past the stretch of wall you speak of so mysteriously, it will need something more magnetic than your proximity and implications.”
“Well,” he replied, “let me ask you how, while I was evidently not with you in our garage, I could nonetheless describe its recent occupation in disturbing, graphic detail, and then explain why my erection, which I’m confident you’ve noted, would not have lost a centimeter, and thereby press my point that we’re of likened minds.”
“It’s true that I am rarely this susceptible,” I said, “and yet, as you seem set to verify, I just murdered my own brother. Far worse, or even stranger at the very least, I’m neither having second thoughts nor do I feel I’ve finished anything of real importance—a lack of loyalty that has inspired its own insidious brand of horror, I assure you.
“What I’m sorting through behind these words, should you be curious, is how killing him involved a problem that I also have with, say, the Nouvelle Vague—i.e., supposed classic films that seem to spellbind everyone with any brains but me—meaning the murder lacked a high point or dramatic arc where I could tell myself, ‘It’s now or never,’ and, frankly, masturbate the scene into an aftermath.
“Maybe that point was when he died, but it was difficult to know exactly when he did, and the violence was so frontal and his heartbeat such a needle in the haystack that I didn’t seem to care that we spent half the time redesigning a cadaver, much less my brother’s.
“Thus, while I wouldn’t mind—peculiarly, if you know me—giving Didier a whirl and then comparing notes on our respective disassociations, I’m also like a child who’s just debarked a carousel and feels himself still spinning, even though he’s in the line to ride a roller coaster.”
Surmising, correctly I suppose, that my wending self-incrimination was a fulsome way of saying “yes,” Olivier ceased his finger exercises, skittering the hand across the wall until it found a filthy bit of otherwise well-tidied molding.
He pinched the grunge, whereupon the wall itself swung open, not stormily enough to fill the hall with bursting splinters or rip his arm out of its socket, and just as handily as if it were a hinged door, which, after Didier had bolted from what looked at first to be a hidden closet, I ascertained it was.
Didier was nothing much to look at, but his face had possibilities. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio, post-
Titanic
, and, more specifically, of his head’s vast sweeps and curves of unused skin in which his features seem to gang up like the finger holes in a bowling ball. Now drizzle that with Kurt Cobain’s scraggly hair at its most unwashed, and you will sort of have the crux of Didier’s outstanding issues at your fingertips.
In other words, he wasn’t quite the eyesore François claimed, but—and here I’ll test out my ill-fitting gaydar for a moment—more a kind of fixer-upper—or, speaking from the future as a hardened cannibal—well, you know how, when you’re stripping someone you’re about to fuck, the first thing you abscond with is his shoes? When one prefers to eat a boy than sleep with him, his face is like that.
So, while I was no more tantalized by him than little girls holding baby dolls are mothers, it seems my wish to leave the house in which Alfonse was so exceptionally imprinted and furiously carved, meaning in everything and everyone, myself included, encouraged me to crowd inside the strange new door with Didier, then walk and crouch and finally crawl behind him down a wooden cave, or so I thought, squeezed and burrowed through unceasing treasuries of spiderwebs and insulation that slowly rubbed the home into the ghost of any structure I had entered in my life, until we found the world’s most secret exit, and I used it.
F
ive weeks after someone in the Paris art world bribed my father’s dust into a ritzy plot in Cemetery Montparnasse that had been held for Liliane Bettencourt before her scandals, his lawyer sent me a strangely exuberant if technically proficient email suggesting we meet that afternoon and parse the estate I was destined to inherit.
My father hadn’t changed his will to suit my brother’s absence, and, in any case, its spillage of more or less a billion euros’ worth of art, properties, and liquid assets was so meticulously preset to drain into two bankbooks that merely scrawling my initials in several pages’ margins plugged the extra spigot.
In fact, our business meeting, with its high-speed shuffling of stapled pages, autographs, and touching anecdotes about the weirdo we would miss for somewhat corresponding reasons, might have been a courtesy, the lawyer told me, had not one faux pas caught his canvassing eye.
It seemed there was a gap amid my father’s properties, specifically a chateau framed by considerable acreage in the hills of Pas de Calais, a northernmost coastal area of France known exclusively to me for its hulking port and metro-like underpinning of abandoned mines.
Unlike my father’s other keepsakes, this effect lacked records pertaining to its upkeep, taxes, or estimated value, and was not officially among my father’s holdings, referenced only once and quickly in a handwritten note in one of the will’s supplementary pages.
First thinking it a pure example of my father’s riddles, the lawyer had halfheartedly typed a few search terms into Google and uncovered a solitary record of said property’s
existence—an item in the archives of the threadbare website of a razor-thin newspaper that served the nearest town.
Dated four or so years prior, the article sought to abridge a thickened curiosity among the town’s two dozen residents regarding a peculiar-looking building that was then under construction on its westernmost fringe.
Quoting some hireling at the construction site, this article revealed the odd contraption’s owner as a Parisian who bore my father’s name. Notwithstanding the in-progress building’s likeness to a theme park’s far-off satellite, it was instead a children’s playhouse, rooted there rather than in the owner’s yard due to its enormity.
Upon completion, the playhouse would huff and puff an illustration in some comic book or other into three usable dimensions and become a walk-in birthday gift for the owner’s younger son. Presumably, this boy would horse around within it on the weekends and over school vacations. Otherwise, it would gather dust and invite local teens’ graffiti.
Most outlandishly, the owner had bypassed the normal practice of employing an architect to coax the inky streaks and dashes into solid matter. Instead, a cosmetic surgeon had been asked to make that difficult transition. The aim of this unorthodox approach, or so the worker said he’d heard, was that the playhouse would be less the drawing’s souvenir or Disneyed offshoot than a twin of the unwrinkled thoughts behind it.
Wedged into one corner of the article was a low-resolution scan of the comic’s panel that had formed the building’s inspiration. My first impression, as I recall, was that the busy-looking, riotously structured prototype might have flourished in the wishy-washy first dimension, but it would surely topple at the onset of the first real breeze.
The only visible phone number on the website was in an ad noting a local florist, and so the lawyer dialed, reaching a loquacious woman who explained that, due to a recent fire, the flower shop was doubling as a pleasant-smelling city hall, and she was both a clerk and the town’s elected mayor.
Yes, she knew of the unearthly building he described. Although once the superstar of local gossip, she said, its mysteries had grown unfashionable, due mostly to the dwelling’s pitiable location off a barely traveled road that was, in truth, merely a driveway for the scattered homes along its edges.
However, not two weeks before the lawyer’s call, the nutty edifice had made a kind of comeback when a stranger and his two sons started shopping at the local lumberyard.
The stranger, whose name she thought she’d overheard as Christophe or maybe Kristof, told the lumberyard’s cashier his boys and he were houseguests at a manor in the area that he might know, at least by reputation, due to its unconventional façade.
Since that very lumberyard’s stock of sawed-up trees had fed the budding structure, the cashier had its preposterous beginnings and backstory at his fingertips, and he repeated what he knew, both to be neighborly and to sound the stranger out.
While the cashier’s tale was technically correct, the stranger said, it was also out of date. The building’s owner was deceased, and his beloved son had disappeared not long before he’d died, abducted, it was thought, by his nanny, who’d also vanished, and whom authorities believed had raped and killed the child for, well, whatever reason pedophiles do horrendous things.
In happier times, this boy had, for no doubt goofy purposes, drafted a will, and with such neat penmanship and official-sounding turns of phrase that this document was fully legal. In his will, the boy had specified that, should he die, his playhouse would be passed down to the genius who’d designed it, and that genius, as luck would have it, was the very man addressing the cashier.
At that point, the mayor announced she had a bird of paradise in need of potting, but she would get in contact with the lawyer should any further scuttlebutt develop.
By the time the lawyer folded his computer, I was staring at the desk it left behind.
In hindsight, I was sappy to have thought myself immunized against my father’s verbal daring-do, and to have blithely guessed that, as the only student of his tricks, I’d been plucked out of the audience, then put in charge of polishing his instrument.
For years, I had defined the marbled swarm to anyone who asked me why my father spoke in plusses as an over-stylization whose effect was no more threatening than the average villain’s phony Russian accent.
Imagine if he typed his half of every conversation, I would posit. His teeth would be the keyboard and his tongue a fingertip. His tone of voice would be the font—a strange idea, granted, and yet planes weighing tons are often airborne—and that font would be, say, Webdings or another logotype whose concept trumps its information.
At worst, I would suggest, were my father in a shifty mood or over-caffeinated, and if you were on his schedule, you might hear yourself repay a compliment on your attire and find you’d placed the winning bid on van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
, in effect.
That, in so many words, was how I thought I’d been instructed to employ this mannered spiel to which you’ve grown accustomed.
Hence, while I knew my father was a pompous, schmoozy motherfucker, I also saw the marbled swarm as hype against which he, the product, was overmatched, like, say, when Mel Gibson played Hamlet, which you might recall earned more money at the box office than every previous production of the play combined dating back to the seventeenth century, even though his version greatly displeased critics.
I’d been oblivious, or, to give myself a credit at which you are invited to balk, innocent—a kind of Robin who wasn’t wedded to uncley Batman but rather hypnotized into an unwitting shadow of the Dark Knight—a carrier of the family tradition no truer to my father’s grand designs than Alfonse’s imitations were to mine.
One afternoon, the gendarme charged with rescuing Alfonse or producing his dead body from thin air confided that, while the case itself remained an open book, or a chapbook at the very least, his gut would like to say the boy was 86 percent deceased at last count.
No sooner had I locked my door, leaned heavily against it, and phoned François to share this reason to relax than my father texted me an invitation to share a dinner in his loft, ostensibly to reengage with the routine of family meals that my brother’s predicament had discontinued.
As I was curious to know if, when sequestered with this most unavailable of parents, I might detect the hots I had assumed, or fantasized, if you prefer the God’s-eye view, he nursed for me, I abided by his offer, likely with a smiley face emoticon, knowing how he hated such abbreviations.
For much of this high-powered meal, which replaced his coffee table’s stack of Christie’s catalogs with tins of Chinese take-out, my father’s head, which I’ll remind you looked a little like Gérard Jugnot’s, starred the long face he had generally fastened to the world since my brother’s truancy had left it hassled.
My face, by contrast, flirted, or, to add some color, nibbled at the turnip cakes astride my crisscrossed chopsticks with the seeping breaths and narrowed, witchy eyes of a young Brigitte Bardot dabbing suntan oil onto her cleavage.
While these efforts earned my crotch some cross checks and a throat clearance or two, our repartee itself maintained a roar of chews and gulps until my father deigned to ask about my day in the most bored voice you can imagine.
“Have you not observed, heard, and recorded for posterity enough of me already,” I asked. “Perhaps my opinion of the Balenciaga shirt I bought this morning or a playlist of the new Muzak at Colette would sate the completist in you?”
As much as I would love to overrule some chums who’ve called my voice a kind of fancy drainage ditch through which my brilliant father’s voice forever sloshes and evaporates, to ask myself to replicate his words verbatim would be like asking you to travel to Miami on the broken champagne bottle that baptized the ship that could have sailed you there in style.
Still, feel free to test what you’ve imagined the first printing of the marbled swarm entailed by clotting and annexing the phraseology that fills my cheaper trade edition.
In so many words, my father said that, were I to share this shopping trip with him, there was a chance his latent curiosity about the rue St. Honoré scene might be tweaked, although less by what I chose to say than by my belief that he would even be half listening.
“You will forgive me if I fall back on a gesture any idiot my age might employ against his elders,” I said, “but, to quote and qualify Rimbaud, I might defy you to prove that I do not contain multitudes.”
My father said the reason I was taught the marbled swarm would be no different had he handed me a signed blank check and said, Here, make me penniless.
In fact, it was specifically to grant my squandered chance a second stimulus that he’d lighted into an experiment, which he understood François had slipped to me in crib note form and that he guessed I would expect him to substantiate.
I’ve edited the one-way conversation that ensued into a draft mundane enough to reach you, and while my text is surely not the half of his, it offers everything I understood. So, if the pages just ahead seem full of secrets and you notice them, I can tell you that I haven’t, and any mindfucks are his.
One day, he said, he was hammering a Wim Delvoye untitled tattooed pigskin he’d recently acquired onto a wall in our old mansion when the nail flew through what he had incorrectly guessed would be a stubborn stretch of bricks.
When he’d withdrawn the nail, the tiny hole had emitted a veritable whistling wind, causing him sufficient wonder that he took to smashing it into a craggy maw through which he eventually inserted most of his head.
He surfaced not plugged into the wall itself but comfortably surrounded by what looked to be a secret room. After gutting the partition, he was able to climb inside this chamber with a flashlight, whose veering beam exposed a door, crudely hacked and with an archway so low-set it seemed to date from when Napoleon was not the dwarf we think today.
Naturally, my father ducked and entered, and, to save us time, discovered that the room was one of dozens that composed a crooked, hypodermal secondary house that interlaced the mansion’s lodgings the way a tree’s branches will twist and turn beneath their foliage.
A phone call to the former owner elicited a round of drinks, which lubricated a confession that, yes, he’d withheld the secret tunnels out of fear that, were the building’s history to be included in the price, it would then be stained with disrepute, and he could never have retrieved his original investment.
He explained that in the 1930s, a man named Arval Benicoeur had resided in the mansion. Benicoeur was a notorious figure at that time due to claiming he had found the Marquis de Sade’s infamously lost novel,
L’Egarement de l’infortune
. Sade had only undertaken
L’Egarement
to re-create
Les 120 journées de Sodome
, now his most commended work, which he’d written while confined in the Bastille and believed until his death had vanished in the prison’s hasty if much celebrated storming.
Upon Sade’s death, his moronic kin had burned the only copy of
L’Egarement
, causing every ersatz bookworm since to hope they’d been misquoted. It was this fabled manuscript that Benicoeur “discovered” in the very hidden passages my father had unearthed.
Shortly after making his outrageous boast, Benicoeur had disappeared, and a subsequent investigation of his abandoned house found no sign of the manuscript, much less the secret area from which he supposedly had dredged it.
Perhaps a dozen years later, a family by the name of Roux, who owned the mansion at the time, had a domestic spat. Things were thrown about, and something bashed a bedroom wall, and, thus, the house within the house had been accounted for.
Deep within it, a desiccated corpse bearing Benicoeur’s distinctive nose was hanging by a noose. Parked against the walls around him, partially disassembled and locked in strange, tricycle-like positions, were fifteen skeletons, sized like children, each one showing evidence of tortures that appeared to match scenarios from Sade’s extremist fiction.
Overflowing from a trash can near Benicoeur’s shriveled feet were the wadded pages of a novel, written in an archaic form of French and scratched out with a feather pen that Sade could easily have used to chart his timeless horrors.
